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Bender's Big Score
Bender's Big Score is the first of four straight-to-DVD movies based on the animated series Futurama, released on November 27, 2007. The movie is written by Ken Keeler and David X. Cohen. Established characters appearing include the Nibblonians, Seymour, Barbados Slim, Morbo, Santa Claus Robot, the God Entity, Al Gore, and Zapp Brannigan. The plot also heavily involves several new characters; a trio of Nudist Alien Scammers, Head Museum technician Lars Fillmore and a narwhal named Leelu. As a bonus, the DVD also includes a 22 minute episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad: "Amazon Adventure", featuring the Hypnotoad. Plot An owl flies through a small hole into Planet Express building, where Hermes gives out the staff roll call, but when they get to the Professor, he says that they're all fired. In 3005, the executives of the Box Network, an allusion to the Fox Network, canceled Planet Express's contract; no one told the crew for two years. Now those executives have been fired and ground into a fine, pink powder, so Planet Express is back "on the air." They throw a party to celebrate, during which Hermes is decapitated by a saber sword and his body crushed by the Planet Express ship. His head is placed in a jar while his body is repaired. The man that performs the procedure, Lars Fillmore, takes an immediate liking to Leela, much to Fry's chagrin. Meanwhile, LaBarbara Conrad goes back to her former husband, Barbados Slim, claiming that Dwight needs a father, not two half fathers. During a delivery to a nude beach planet, Leela points out a Bender tattoo on Fry's ass, of which Fry was unaware. While on the beach, a trio of Nudist Alien Scammers use flimsy excuses to get the entire Planet Express crew to sign petitions and provide their e-mail addresses. Upon returning to Earth, the entire crew receives hundreds of spam messages. The crew responds to the offers and Bender is infected with a virus. The scammers fool Professor Farnsworth into signing his business over to them, and they show up to take over. Bender's virus compels him to obey the scammers without question. The scammers are drawn to the tattoo on Fry's buttocks, which is revealed to contain the code for a Paradox-Free Time Travel Machine. Bender reads this binary code, which summons a time sphere from the God Entity. Nibbler reveals his sentience, explaining that using the code even once could destroy the universe, but they ignore him. Nibbler calls in some Kitten class attack ships to stop the scammers, only to be defeated by chairs. Nudar uses the sphere to go back to last night, meeting his past self and they "ended up at my place, or shall I say, our place.", making out with his past self. Farnsworth states that he knows a paradox when he sees it and accidentally crushes "yesterday Nudar" with his Smell-O-Scope. Because the time portal is only a one way trip and cannot bring anyone back to the present, the scammers have Bender use the code to steal valuable objects from Earth's past, waiting out the time in between in the limestone cave beneath Planet Express. They also have Bender replace the Professor's Spheroboom doomsday device, placing it with a rose with a tag that reads, "You've been scammed, Sweetheart". During this time, Hermes asks Bender to travel back in time and kill an earlier version of himself for a replacement body. However, Zoidberg unknowingly attaches Hermes's head the wrong way, making him facing backwards. The angry bureaucrat chases Zoidberg. Meanwhile, the Professor and the Harlem Globetrotters analyzes the time-travel code. Though the Professor states that time travel is impossible, Ethan 'Bubblegum' Tate figures out that paradox-free time travel is possible. The factor that corrects the paradoxes is the doom field, which, if raised exponentially, could destroy the fabric of causality, exactly what Nibbler was trying to tell them. Zoidberg and Hermes run in. The scientists are shocked about Hermes' duplicate body. The doom field results in all time-travel duplicates, including Hermes' new body, to be essentially doomed. Hermes doesn't care, as he will need the duplicate body only long enough to win back LaBarbara. Once Bender has stolen everything of value from history, the scammers finally care if the universe gets destroyed. They decide to destroy the time-travel code by killing Fry and blanking Bender's memory. Fry uses the time code to escape to January 1, 2000, the day he was frozen, and Bender is sent back to kill him. Bender creates a duplicate of himself when he needs to use the bathroom, going back nineteen seconds. Then another Bender in a tuxedo appears, claiming to be from "way at the end", putting a rub-on time code on Fry's butt. The second duplicate catches Fry as he appears in the past and attempts to kill him, only to have his feelings for Fry and his inability to urinate to cause an overload. Fry shoves him in a cryogenic-tube before he can explode. Fry leaves and the original Bender fails to catch him. He tries to commit suicide only to learn that he was in a 20th century phone booth. He begins to search for Fry, going through a list of names in the phone book. He skips past a hobo named Fry and Fry's former girlfriend Michelle, making out with her new boyfriend, Constantine. Bender spends the next twelve years hunting Fry and causes Al Gore to lose the 2000 election to George W. Bush. After ending up at Yancy's house and mistaking Philip J. Fry II for his friend, he is directed to the North Pole. While attempting to stow aboard a boat, Bender spots a bearded Fry and chases after him, temporarily sidetracked by Al Gore, who can't control his Hybrataxi. Eventually, Bender blows up Panucci's Pizza when Fry walks inside, also turning Seymour to dolomite. Once Bender returns to report his apparent success, the scammers wipe his memory of the code, fifty Terabytes of porn and the virus. Suddenly, Fry shows up at his own funeral. He explains that in the past, he couldn't buy pizza from Panucci's with his futuristic money, so he went to Applied Cryogenics for free pizza, but it had turned cold. He went back an hour to eat the pizza when it was still warm. After talking with the Fry who locked Bender in the cryogenic tube, he realized that his frozen self still had 20th century money. Unfortunately, he accidentally touches his own frozen butt and slips on a chair, which caused him to fall into the tube once again. Once his younger self got out of the tube, the 3007 Fry froze himself for 7.95 years. Bender tries to kill him again but the Professor stops him, informing him that when the time code duplicates a living thing, the copy is always doomed. Nibbler destroys the time travel tattoo to keep the scammers from abusing it further, as well as saving 40% of Fry's rectum. What happened to the Fry Bender murdered is also explained. In the paradox in which Fry decides to live above Punucci's, he lives his 20th century life; delivering pizzas, spending time with his family and using his seven leaf clover against Yancy in basketball. Eventually, he gets over Leela, deciding to find his own purpose in life. When he sees a poor narwhal named Leelu, he decides to be her caretaker, as he is the only one who can assist her in eating. When Leelu is released back into the wild, Fry enlists Panucci's cousin Leroy to find Leelu and bring her back to New York. After two years, and 108 narwhals later, setting them all free and eating nothing but sausage, they find her. Noticing that Leelu is interesting in a male narwhal, Fry decides to let her go. Even during this depression, Leela and Lars decide to get married. Fry tries to stop the wedding by replacing a pen full of ink with a pen with no ink, but Lars had an extra. Meanwhile, Hermes was able to win back LaBarbara by zippering up her dress, which Barbados was unable to do. Leela accidentally hits Hermes with the empty pen, resulting in a chandelier slicing off his head and crushing his duplicate body. The Professor explains that he expected that, since all duplicates are doomed. Lars becomes agitated by this news and calls off the wedding. LaBarbara leaves Hermes again for Barbados, even though his original body is almost repaired. Richard Nixon, President of Earth, is tricked into selling Earth to the scammers and everyone is forced to immigrate off the planet. The Planet Express Crew moves to Neptune. After learning that Robot Santa was cheated out of his naughty list, Leela decides it's time to fight back and forces Santa to help them. Though they had enough ships to mount a rag tag attack, Nixon says that the scammers have a fleet of solid gold Death Stars defending Earth. However, Santa grants them access to his factory for weapons and calls in his holiday friends, Kwanzabot and the Chanuka Zombie. Zapp Brannigan arrives to take command, but before the fleet can link computers with the Nimbus, the Death Stars de-cloak and send it crashing to the ground; Leela then takes de facto command. Unfortunately, she can't coordinate so many ships, so Hermes offers his bureaucratic mind to assist the fleet. He destroys all the Death Stars; this helps Hermes win back LaBarbara. However, the scammers have one last trick, the Sphere-O-Boom doomsday device that Bender had stolen for them. The scammers demand their surrender, but Bender stole it back after being released from their control. The crew fires the device at the scammers' ship, destroying it. On New Year's Day, 3008, Bender explains that while sawing off the Professor's hand with a dull saw, he figured that he needed the doomsday device for himself. Once he was out of the scammer's control, he "pulled the old switchoroo". Fry sees that Leela is still unhappy that Lars left her at the altar and tries to get them back together. However, just as Lars is about to tell Fry something important, the reunion is cut short by Nudar, who survived the doomsday device through use of a radiation-proof vest. Nudar claims that the time-travel code still exists and is on Lars. Lars tricks him into approaching the cryo-tube with Bender on overload; once that Bender is released, the explosion kills them both. The explosion singes off some of Lars' clothing, revealing the time-travel tattoo. A flashback explains that Lars is actually Fry's duplicate, having survived Bender's attack in 2012, which burned off his hair and injured his larynx, deepening his voice. Upon realizing that he was Lars, the duplicate Fry froze himself to return to the future and be with Leela, hitching a ride in Michelle's tube, arriving in 3002 and taking a job at the Head Museum. However, he realizes at the wedding that, as a duplicate, he was doomed, so he left Leela at the altar to spare her the pain of becoming a widow. During the funeral, Bubblegum and Nibbler state that nothing makes sense anymore, so someone will have to travel back and put the time tattoo on Fry in the first place; this job Bender did, by removing the tattoo from Lars and traveling into the past to place it on the Fry frozen in the Cryogenic tube. Upon returning, Bender reveals that he had convinced his time-travel duplicates in the cave to remain with him instead of emerging when they were logically supposed to. Then they all emerge together. Nibbler, horrified, shouts "Everyone out of the Universe!", before eating himself. The sheer number of time-paradox Benders causes a giant tear in the universe. "Well, we're boned," says the normal, non-doomed, Bender. This tear in the universe leads into the next movie The Beast With a Billion Backs Trivia *Fleb is reading a book called "A Brief History of Time Travel", copyright 4972. *While on a date, Leela and Lars visit the "Cylon War Memorial Make Out Point", a reference to Battlestar Galactica. *When the film was cut into separate episodes, the three additional opening captions were: "Watch, Rinse, Repeat", "Apply directly to the foreclaw" (a reference to HeadOn), and "Last Known Transmission of the Hubble Telescope". *Eric Cartman's head can be seen in the Head Museum. (54:02 - 54:11). *Leelu's name is a possible reference to the film 'The Fifth Element'. *The title may be a reference to the 1972 film 'Shaft's Big Score' starring Richard Roundtree. * In Santa's workshop the toys are a possible reference to the comic, "Life in Hell" by Matt Groening. DVD Extras/Special Features * Commentary by Matt Groening, David X Cohen, Billy West, John DiMaggio, Phil LaMarr, Claudia Katz, Dwayne Carey-Hill and Ken Keeler * Futurama Returns A live comic book reading by the Futurama Cast * Everybody Loves Hypnotoad: "Amazon Adventure", A full length episode * Deleted Storyboard Scenes * A Terrifying Message from Al Gore, animated promo for An Inconvenient Truth, featuring Bender, Billy West and Al Gore * Bite My Shiny Metal X, a Futurama Maths Lecture * Script: First Draft * New Character/Design Sketches * Original 5-minute Comic-Con Promo * Futurama: Beast With a Billion Backs, Trailer * Easter Egg - Ken Keeler Sketch Goofs * In The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings, Leela seemed to be in love with Fry. However, throughout this entire movie and it successors, no love towards Fry is visible. It wasn't until Into The Wild Green Yonder that her love was seen. * In the climax of the film, when Leela, Lars, and Fry are at the cryogenics lab it is day. However, in the scene before this, it is night, and Fry told Leela to meet him up there in 5 minutes. Although the new year of 3008 was being celebrated outside, so this could have been sometime after midnight while the sun was beginning to rise. * In "Future Stock", Fry's butt is clear of any Bender tattoo. It is possible that at that point in time, Bender hadn't placed the tattoo on his butt yet. * Michelle's boyfriend's name was Charles in Space Pilot 3000, but this could be his middle name. * Philip J. Fry II was named after Fry disappeared. If Lars was Fry, it messes up the entire timeline of Futurama. Reaction *The film got completely positive reviews and a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.com. Debut Appearances *Dr. Cahill *Chanuka Zombie *Charles de Gaulle's head *Leelu *Leroy *Nudist Alien Scammers **Nudar **Sclump **Fleb *Zylex Category:Season Five Category:Movies